Items tagged with APU

As if AMD’s Q1 financial performance wasn’t bad enough, the company’s revised Q2 guidance is actually worse than expected. The company originally forecast a 3 percent sequential drop in quarterly revenue (the company added a +/- 3 percent margin or error indicating a 6 percent decline as worst case scenario), but now has revised that figure to a more troubling 8 percent. AMD’s Q1 2015 revenue came in at $1.03 billion, so an 8 percent dip in Q2 revenue would put the company at roughly $948 million (analysts were expecting revenue of around $999.6 million). Compared to Q2 2014, when AMD pulled in...Read more...

AMD previously only teased bits of detail regarding their forthcoming 6th Generation A-Series APU, code named "Carrizo." We heard from AMD about this next generation, highly integrated mobile architecture as far back as CES 2015 in January and then again in February and more recently with AMD's HSA (Heterogenous System Architecture) 1.0 spec roll-out in March. It's safe to say AMD has been beating the drum on Carrizo with a regular cadence for the better part of 6 months now and today the company is finally going to full kimono on all details of their upcoming processor silicon and its platform....Read more...

AMD first started dishing out details on Carrizo, the successor to Kaveri, during the closing months of 2014. AMD is claiming that Carrizo, which is still built on Global Foundries’ 28nm Super High Performance (28SHP) process node like its predecessor, will nonetheless deliver huge advances in both performance and efficiency. When it was first announced, AMD detailed support for next generation Radeon Graphics (DX12, Mantle, and Dual Graphics support), H.265 decoding, full HSA 1.0 support, and ARM Trustzone compatibility. But perhaps one of the biggest advantages of Carrizo is the fact that the...Read more...

It's not too often that we get a preview of the performance from an upcoming processor from SiSoftware's Sandra database, but this becomes one of the rare exceptions. The victim is a 'Gardenia Carrizo' processor from AMD, one that represents the final Excavator-based models. At CES, we learned that Carrizo will be a minor evolution of previous architectures, with a major emphasis on low-power. That's not the only change, though, as the chip could be bringing with it 256-bit AVX registers. That might not matter in the grand scheme for most people, but it's an improvement nonetheless. For full performance...Read more...

CES is the time of year when computing companies of every type show off their next-generation hardware, and AMD is no exception. Hot Hardware sat down with the Sunnyvale-based company to talk about its major plans for 2015 in both gaming and the CPU side of the business. In gaming, the big news of the event is the imminent deployment of displays based on the so-called FreeSync standard. FreeSync is the brand name created for what the VESA (Video Electronics Standard Association) refers to as Adaptive Sync (not to be confused with NVIDIA's "Adaptive V-Sync." Both FreeSync...Read more...

AMD's Future of Compute event was this week and the company has made a number of announcements regarding new technology and the future of its HSA, Mantle, and FreeSync projects. First up, there's Carrizo, AMD's upcoming follow-on to Kaveri and the first chip to use its "Excavator" CPU cores. AMD is projecting that both Carrizo and Carrizo-L will launch in the first half of 2015. Typically, for AMD, that means the May or June timeframe. The company hasn't said much about features or capabilities of these new parts, though its press release does note that Carrizo will support "4K experiences." OpenCL...Read more...

While there’s no guarantee for traction in the market, lowering the price to a point where consumers can’t help but notice is surely a step in the right direction. AMD’s doing just that with its A-series APUs this week, which is hopes will enable more mainstream PC builders to snag a twelve compute core (4CPU + 8GPU) A-series APU without completely breaking the bank. It’s also suggesting that these products will support DX12, OpenCL 2.0, and Project FreeSync in the future, which should ease any concerns about their ability to handle what’s just around the bend. The...Read more...

AMD updated its family of Kaveri-based A-Series APUs for desktop systems today. We first took an official look at Kaveri back in January, when we evaluated the A8-7600 APU. That particular APU is being re-launched today at a new price point, but AMD is also introducing a couple of new APUs as well, namely the A10-7800 and the A6-7400K. As their names suggest, the A10-7800 is a somewhat higher-end APU than the A8-7600 we initially evaluated, and the A6-7400K is a lower-end variant with fewer cores. We’ve got an A10-7800 in hand and have run it through an array of benchmark to show you what...Read more...

AMD updated its family of Kaveri-based A-Series APUs for desktop systems today. We first took an official look at Kaveri back in January, when we evaluated the A8-7600 APU. That particular APU is being re-launched today at a new price point, but AMD is also introducing a couple of new APUs as well, namely the A10-7800 and the A6-7400K. As their names suggest, the A10-7800 is a somewhat higher-end APU than the A8-7600 we initially evaluated, and the A6-7400K is a lower-end variant with fewer cores. The Updated AMD Kaveri-Based APU Line Up - Find Them At Amazon The complete breakdown of AMD’s...Read more...

When Nvidia unveiled its GeForce Experience application last year, AMD was quick to return fire, but the company's version of the Raptr software client lagged Nvidia's application in several areas. While both could be used to optimize a game for best performance, Raptr (nee Gaming Evolved) didn't have the same ability to record or stream in-game footage. The company claims to have solved that problem with version 4.0 of the Gaming Evolved App, with the new ability to broadcast to Twitch, record footage to the hard drive, optimize games at the push of a button, and with new support for webcam overlays...Read more...

According to AMD, there are 3 billion personal computers worldwide and some 30 million servers, and they consume approximately 1% and 1.5% of all energy consumed annually. The cost for all that juice is between $14-$18 billion, and the company believes it can do better--25 times better, actually. AMD is planning to increase the efficiency of its APUs by a factor of 25 by the year 2020. “Through APU architectural enhancements and intelligent power efficient techniques, our customers can expect to see us dramatically improve the energy efficiency of our processors during the next several years,”...Read more...

AMD has had a tough time competing with Intel on the desktop lately, but when it comes to mobile technology, in the notebook arena, performance, value and power efficiency are measured against a very different yardstick. That's not to say that CPU throughput and IPC isn't important in a notebook, not by a long shot, but multimedia performance in these highly integrated designs can matter much more than desktop designs where discrete graphics engines are easily accommodated. Back in January of this year, we covered AMD's launch of their Kaveri core-based A8-7600 APU. Targeted for desktops...Read more...

AMD has had a tough time competing with Intel on the desktop lately, but when it comes to mobile technology, in the notebook arena, performance, value and power efficiency are measured against a very different yardstick. That's not to say that CPU throughput and IPC isn't important in a notebook, not by a long shot, but multimedia performance in these highly integrated designs can matter much more than desktop designs where discrete graphics engines are easily accommodated. Back in January of this year, we covered AMD's launch of their Kaveri core-based A8-7600 APU. Targeted for...Read more...

A couple of weeks back, we got the chance to get some hands on time with AMD’s upcoming mainstream and low-power APUs (Accelerated Processing Units), codenames Beema and Mullins. These APUs are the successors to last year’s Temash and Kabini APUs, which powered an array of small form factor and mobile platforms. With this release, however, AMD was laser focused on improving power consumption and efficiency, expanding the platform’s capabilities through both hardware and software tweaks, and of course improving performance over the previous generation. Beema and Mullins are based...Read more...